Tag: event

First of all, as others have reported, at this year’s GUADEC, it was great to see an actual increase in numbers of attendees compared to previous years. This shows us that 20 years later, the community as a whole is still healthy and doing well.

At the conference venue.

While the Manchester weather was quite challenging, the conference was well-organized and I believe we all had a lot of fun both at the conference venue and at social events, especially at the awesome GNOME 20th Birthday Party. Kudos to all who made this happen!

At the GNOME 20th Birthday Party.

As I reported at the GNOME Foundation AGM, the docs team has been slightly more quiet recently than in the past and we would like to reverse this trend going forward.

At the GNOME 20th Birthday Party.

We held a shared docs and translation session for newcomers and regulars alike on the first two days of the post-GUADEC unconference. I was happy to see new faces showing up as well as having a chance to work a bit with long-time contributors. Special thanks goes to Kat for managing the docs-feedback mailing list queue, and Andre for a much needed docs bug triage.

Busy working on docs and translations at the unconference venue.

Shaun worked on a new publishing system for help.gnome.org that could replace the current library-web scripts requiring release tarballs to get the content updated. The new platform would be a Pintail-based website with (almost) live content updates.

Localization-wise, there was some discussion around language packs, L10n data installation and initial-setup, spearheaded by Jens Petersen. While in gnome-getting-started-docs, we continue to replace size-heavy tutorial video files with lightweight SVG files, there is still a lot of other locale data left that we should aim to install on the user’s machine automatically when we know the user’s locale preference, though this is not quite what the user’s experience looks like nowadays. Support for that is something that I believe will require more input from PackageKit folks as well as from downstream installer developers.

The docs team also announced a change of leadership, with Kat passing the team leadership to me at GUADEC.

In other news, I announced a docs string freeze pilot that we plan to run post-GNOME 3.26.0 to allow translators more time to complete user docs translations. Details were posted to the gnome-doc-list and gnome-i18n mailing list. Depending on the community feedback we receive, we may run the program again in the next development cycle.

The docs team also had to cancel the planned Open Help Conference Docs Sprint due to most core members being unavailable around that time. We’ll try to find a better time for a docs team meetup some time later this year or early 2018. Let me know if you want to attend, the docs sprints are open to everybody interested in GNOME documentation, upstream or downstream.

At the closing session.

Last but not least, I’d like to say thank you to the GNOME Foundation and the Travel Committee for their continuous support, for sponsoring me again this year.

The GNOME documentation team started planning the next docs hackfest after some (rather long) months of decreased activity on that front. The previous docs sprint was actually held in Cincinnati, OH, in 2015, produced lots of content updates and we’d like to repeat that experience again this year from August 14th through 16th, 2017.

As with the previous event, the 2017 docs sprint will happen right after the Open Help Conference, which is returning this year thanks to Shaun.

What we want to do differently this year is extending invitation to all people interested in GNOME content, whether it is upstream or downstream. We would especially like to see some Ubuntu folks attending. With Ubuntu moving to upstream GNOME, we are already seeing an increased number of docs patches coming from Ubuntu contributors, which is great, and I think having a joint documentation event could strengthen and expand the connections even more!

In one of the sessions, Shaun gave a presentation onpintail, a site builder that lets you publish your documents from sources in Mallard, Ducktype, DocBook, AsciiDoc (the latter coming soon), and so on, using yelp-xsl, a package also used in GNOME Docs. We are hoping to see pintail deployed in the Fedora Documentation Project soon, to replace the aging Publican-based documentation website.

As for the lightning talk session, I was really impressed by Eleanor Blandford and her presentation skills, given the fact that she is only 10! Future GNOME hacker?

It was great to see GUADEC turning into a family-friendly conference. Several families attended and there was a children’s corner available right at the venue.

During the hackfest days, I mostly worked on squashing various documentation bugs and adding more Mallard test tokens into gnome-getting-started-docs.

Distributors: If your distro is shipping Firefox (and not Epiphany) as the default browser, please file a bug similar to #770013 so that we can add test tokens for your distro into the getting-started page on web browsing.

Jakub and I also quickly reviewed the current SVGs and remaining getting-started videos. Updates are coming in the next release! With Shaun, we had a look at pintail and its support for building the Fedora DocBook-based guides.

As this picture says, GUADEC 2016 was well-organized and successful, so yes, thank you again organizers!

So I’m here in Karlsruhe, Germany attending GUADEC 2016. Today was the second conference day with the GNOME Foundation AGM, which, as the tradition goes, included team reports. As for L10n & docs teams, the update from the GNOME Translation Project was given by Alexandre Franke and the docs update was given by yours truly.

If you are at GUADEC tomorrow, don’t miss Kat’s talk Documentation: state of the union with more detailed updates on what’s been happening in GNOME docs land over the past 12 months.

Starting Monday, we are having a GNOME docs sprint at the GUADEC BoF venue. Our primary goal is to work on GNOME Help updates for the upcoming stable release but come join us even if you are not a contributing writer yet. We will guide you through the writing process and gladly convert you into a successful GNOME writer!

Last but not least, big thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me!

The hackfest was held at a lovely co-working place called Platform 53 in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river from downtown Cincinnati. During the three intensive days full of writing, the docs team managed to update tons of pages throughout GNOME Help.

Due to the timing of the 3.18.0 stable release, the updates, together with some updated translations, eventually landed in 3.18.1.

I mostly focused on updating user account, power, and printing help. These should be in a good shape now. There are exceptions, though, like documentation on enterprise login, which is pending some code-related updates.

Some of us struggled with getting a 3.18.0 up and running. We tried different build images from GNOME Continuous, Fedora, and openSUSE. While there seems to be a plenty of options at first glance, when it comes to being able to try out and preview the actual GNOME Desktop, I think there is still a long way to go.

Testing some of the cool features in 3.18 can get challenging, for example, automatic screen brightness that requires an integrated light sensor. I wish I had one!

The team had a profound discussion about restructuring some of the most visible topics and topic groups in GNOME Help. We made good progress, although some of the issues, including content duplicity, remain unresolved. Material for the next hackfest?

Although this somewhat slipped through the cracks, it’s never too late to socialize the notes taken by Nuritzi Sanchez of Endless Mobile fame during the L10n-i18n-Docs BoF we ran at GUADEC 2015 (many thanks for taking them!).

In a nutshell, the BoF attendees, both translators and documentation writers, touched a number topics spanning from screenshot automation (a follow-up from previous year’s BoF) to onboarding, mentoring and improving the projects’ getting started material for contributors, to glossaries, style guides and similar resources.

If you are interested in any of those topics, please have a look.

Hope the notes can be reused as follow-ups in future i18n and/or docs meetings.

The area around Cincinnati has a strong German heritage, so no wonder the library also features some German manuscripts. Reminds me of my years spent studying paleography.

The Open Help Conference is not like one of those industry conferences with large numbers of participants but the attendees here are, on the other hand, very focused on the specific topic of open source documentation and docs community management. It’s always cool to see how other communities approach community docs, and learn some new tricks along the way.

Great to see old faces again, and meet new ones. I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation for making it possible for me to attend the conference and hackfest.

With Bara Ancincova of Red Hat docs fame, we ran a docs workshop at this year’s DevConf in Brno. It was mostly a follow-up to to a Fedora documentation hackfest held at Flock 2014 in Prague. Quite a few people showed up Saturday afternoon, which was a nice surprise, given that docs sessions are usually not among the most attended at a technical conference.

Some of the topics we touched included:

DevAssistant. Slavek Kabrda joined us to give a short presentation about what DevAssistant has to offer when it comes to kick-starting your projects. Based on the ideas we first explored at Flock, Slavek and Jaromir Hradilek started to hack on a new assistant that will mostly serve people who are getting started with DocBook, the Publican toolchain, and Fedora documentation. However, there is nothing preventing us from making a step further and including support for other documentation projects, formats, and toolchains, if there is interest (and people willing to help out).

The plan is for DevAssistant to be able to create a complete writing environment that would let you set up a basic structure for your new documentation project, with templates and different content types.

DevAssistant works well in both CLI and GUI mode. While developers and some documentation writers might prefer to work on the command line, newcomers often prefer a GUI option. Both options, however, provide an integrated solution that lets you work within a single app (and write in a text editor of choice). This means that DevAssistant aims for both the developer and documentation writer audiences, which often overlap anyway.

Building documentation. We talked about Jenkins, which is typically used in a software development environment. Since Jenkins can run pretty much any commands available on the server, it can also easily be used to take care of your continuous documentation builds. This makes docs QA’ing and reviewing so much easier.

Publishing documentation. This is a long-standing issue in Fedora. We explored the idea of using Jenkins and Jenkiscat for Fedora.

Testing your documentation. In this segment, Jaromir Hradilek talked about Emender, an emerging test automation framework for documentation. Its goal is to allow you to run a number of tests against your (semantic) documentation. Ultimately, this can save tons of time on the docs QA front, especially when you are maintaining a huge and ever-increasing number of documents for different projects or products.

A number of great ideas were put forth for future documentation events which I hope we could organize later this year.

Builder comes with a feature-rich text editor that can also be useful for documentation writers who often author documents in XML.

Cosimo Cecchi showed us some of the downstream changes the Endless team made to gnome-user-docs and gnome-getting-started-docs. For me, personally, the most interesting part was their feedback on the GNOME docs style and content. Endless seem to target their product to a slightly different customer, still, they appear to have data on their users that the upstream project lacks. The GNOME help suite, written by different authors and in different style over the course of many years, is actually targeted at multiple audiences, spanning from quite inexperienced desktop end-users to skilled users who need to troubleshoot VMs in GNOME Boxes.

Shaun McCance showcased some of the cool features of Ducktype, a new lightweight syntax for Mallard. Although still a work in progress, this new syntax brings to the world of Mallard docs the flexibility of formats such as AsciiDoc or Markdown, which are now gaining strong popularity in both the developer and technical communication communities.

The docs team focused on squashing the bugs filed against GNOME Help and application help, and on content improvements in different areas of the desktop documentation stack. Jim Campbell worked on changing the structure and layout of Files help. He also worked with Jana Svarova on VPN docs for the GNOME sysadmin guide. Jana went through the docs feedback ML archives, responding to user comments and filing new bugs. Kat worked on application help with Jim and fixed a couple of bugs in gnome-user-docs. I worked on triaging docs bugs, and then on reviewing and updating some parts of GNOME Help and the sysadmin guide.

I would like to thank Collabora for providing the venue and catering, Kat and Philip Withnall for running the hackfests, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me.

It’s been great to see old and new faces from the community, now off to Brussels for FOSDEM, then back to Brno for DevConf!

On Monday, Kat will give an update from the docs team called Documentation: state of the union. Her talk will detail what has happened in the documentation realm since GUADEC 2013, so be sure to attend.

Team Reports on Saturday will include localization and documentation.

There will be a screenshot automation BoF on July 30th. Vadim Rutkovsky from Red Hat’s Desktop QE has some sweet surprise for you, translators!

Finally, on July 30th and 3Ist, Daiki Ueno and Alexandre Franke are planning to organize an i18n hackfest to work on translation tools, spellcheckers, dictionaries, input methods, and related fields.

I’ll be arriving tomorrow evening with Christian Schaller and other desktop people from Red Hat Czech and leaving on the 31st – hope to see you all in Strasbourg!